This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 14th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Obama administration official Jean Spurling argues that sequestration will mean an end to

three quarters of a million jobs.

More than that, he says every independent economist agrees.

Richard Braun, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute Institute begs to differ.

Here's the quote from Jean Spurling on ABC's this week.

Every independent economist agrees it is going to cost our economy 750,000 jobs

as our economy has a chance to take off.

He's talking about sequestration, which is, for almost every part of government not a real cut in any

meaningful way.

It is a reduction in budget increases.

Pentagon and a couple of other departments have taken actual cuts, but again, this should be

understood as a tiny cut in an overall large increase in federal spending.

I would argue that no responsible economist would argue that's going to cost jobs at all.

You can argue that the sequester will reduce the growth in government employment by a small amount,

but you'll more than make up for in the growth in private employment.

We look what's happened since 2007. Right now we have 3 million fewer

Americans at work than we're in 2007. The real federal budget has grown by more than 25%. That's inflation

adjusted since that time. According to Keynesian theory, we should be at full

employment now. In fact, the administration's own forecast would have us with an

unemployment rate of less than 6%.

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